Style combination · Contrasts

DTC 'Blanding' × Hype Streetwear Graphics

Both centre one product on a plain ground, but direct-to-consumer brands use lowercase geometric sans and pastels to look friendly and always available, while hype graphics use loud spot colour, heavy oblique or capital wordmarks and scarcity; pick approachability or exclusivity.

From the research on Hype Streetwear Graphics (Box Logo to Quotation Marks)

Mix them and make something DTC 'Blanding' Hype Streetwear Graphics

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Hype Streetwear Graphics, their arrangement from DTC 'Blanding', the finish from DTC 'Blanding'. Not a real work, and not an image of either style.

What each style brings

Each part of the design comes from the style with the stronger say in it, and each style gives at least two.

DTC 'Blanding' / Millennial Minimalism Hype Streetwear Graphics (Box Logo to Quotation Marks)

Type from DTC 'Blanding': Geometric sans
Grotesque & neo-grotesque
Colour from Hype Streetwear Graphics: Limited spot colours
Flat fields
Form from Hype Streetwear Graphics: Emblems & badges
Rectilinear
Composition from DTC 'Blanding': Isolated object
Generous white space
Surface from DTC 'Blanding': Flat

The type

Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.

Display · DTC 'Blanding'

Hello

Hanken Grotesk, standing in for Circular (Laurenz Brunner, Lineto, 2013)

Text · Hype Streetwear Graphics

The logo-led graphics of streetwear since the 1990s: one wordmark or emblem on a plain T-shirt, hoodie or object is the product. Supreme's white Futura Heavy Oblique in a red box (1994), modelled on Barbara Kruger's captions, set the type; A Bathing Ape in Tokyo spread camouflage prints; Virgil Abloh's Off-White (2013) added generic words in quotation marks, diagonal stripes and barricade tape. Co-branded lockups with luxury houses and mass brands, sold in scarce weekly drops, turn a flat spot-colour logo into a status object.

Jost; Hype Streetwear Graphics used Futura Heavy Oblique in white reversed out of a red box (Supreme, from 1994), taken from Barbara Kruger's captions, which are set in Futura Bold Oblique or Helvetica Ultra Condensed on red bars and Shawn Stussy's surname scrawled with a broad-tipped marker, in the early 1980s, derived from his uncle Jan Stussy's signature and then printed on T-shirts, shorts and caps: the signature as logo

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Hype Streetwear Graphics, with a counter-accent from DTC 'Blanding'. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.

DTC 'Blanding' / Millennial Minimalism Hype Streetwear Graphics (Box Logo to Quotation Marks)

#ffffff ground · 36%
#111111 ink · 14%
#f6c90e accent · 18%
#d27c5d accent · 14%
#e4202a accent · 10%
#f2e3a8 accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #ffffff;
  --ink: #111111;
  --accent-1: #f6c90e;
  --accent-2: #d27c5d;
  --accent-3: #e4202a;
  --accent-4: #f2e3a8;
  --font-display: "Hanken Grotesk", sans-serif;
  --font-text: "Jost", sans-serif;
}

Use it with care

Hype Streetwear Graphics (Box Logo to Quotation Marks): Streetwear grew out of African-American and Latino hip-hop dress in New York, and its turn into a global luxury phenomenon has been criticised as cultural appropriation; Dapper Dan's Harlem boutique, which pioneered logo-covered garments, was closed by counterfeiting raids and a Fendi lawsuit in 1992, and Gucci's 2017 jacket followed his 1989 design for Diane Dixon and was called a homage only after criticism. The marks are living trademarks that their owners defend (Supreme sued Married to the Mob in 2013) and Kruger's work is her own: design your own wordmark and collaborations, do not reproduce the Supreme box, the Off-White stripes or luxury monograms (the Off-White stripes were themselves disputed as borrowed from Ben Kelly, who popularised the graphic in the early 1980s; generic hazard striping is free, a brand's lockup is not), credit the culture you draw on, including the AAVE origin of the word hypebeast, and never present a generated image as a real product or drop.